I have too much to say about this load of pretentious pseudo-”artistic” nonsense also known as “ef – a tale of memories” to put in my short round up, so it gets it’s own post…

What on earth were SHAFT thinking when they made this? It looked like it could have been quite good, but sadly it’s been ruined by a bunch of random animation effects every few seconds. Do we really need that many camera cuts, zoom outs, pans of clouds? Heck even Kyon in ep 1 of Haruhi can point out pointless could pans, and there were only 2 of them in that episode, ef episode 1 has bloody 72 shots of clouds…. 72 FFS (on average 1 every 20 seconds)!!!

I took the liberty of going through the whole episode and making a tally of all the pointless effects they’ve used, and i’ve gotta say i’m impressed, the random effects far outweighed any normal scenes in the show:

Shot of clouds: 72
Zoomed out shot when people talking: 38
Half of head when talking: 26
Random glow: 23
Shot of random object: 18
Black & white scene: 17
Random colour overlay: 17
Shot of hands: 15
Zoomed in shot of eye: 11
Silhouette: 9
Shot of feet: 7
Shot of sea: 6
Sunset scene: 5
Shot of shadow: 5
Shot of moon: 5
Paintbrush filter: 4
Random blur: 2
Random glare: 2
Random letter boxed image: 2
Picture in picture: 1

Are they trying to hide their lack of animation budget by in fact having no animation whatsoever in the show, just people standing still talking with a random photoshop filter and some clouds every few seconds to distract everyone. If so, i think they might have gone a little bit over the top.

Or is it someone bought them a new animation program and like a 5 year old with a new transformer wanted to try out every single option the program had to offer (all in the space of 24 minutes?).

Or… do they possibly think that this turd they have produced is called “art”, because if so, the only people they are fooling are themselves.

As said over here, this is not Pani Poni Dash, Negima, Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, why ruin a perfectly good show with pretentious “artistic” (as i’m sure they like to call it) bollocks, all this reminds me why i avoid Covent Garden in London, full of pretentious “artists” painting everywhere. Art classes these days need a module on “how not to be an ass”.

I think we can all come up with a few alternative names for it, anyone want to add any?

ef – a tale of cloud pans

ef – a tale of photoshop filters